End of School and Orange Themed Teacher Gift

I can't believe another school year has gone by! 9 months ago Nathan was excitedly getting ready for 1st grade - remember this picture?

And now here he is on his last day....he's grown so much!



His thoughts on his last day of school:

Of course he wouldn't have so many great things to say about first grade if he wouldn't have had a wonderful teacher. And a wonderful teacher deserves a special gift for getting us to this point! Last year I used some subway art to make a teacher appreciation gift for his Kindergarten teacher {you can check that out HERE if you are interested}. I have spent the year pinning all kinds of fun gift ideas for this year's teacher gift and finally settled on one when I saw this adorable Orange You Glad It's Almost Summer Gift Basket from Shaken Together. I just thought it was super cute and loved how bright and cheery it was.  I decided to check out the Dollar Store for my supplies and found plenty of fun orange themed stuff. Altogether, less than $10 spent (including the white tub to which I hot glued some orange ribbon). The tag is part of a free printable pdf, from Shaken Together, where you can also find some more fruit inspired tags for future appreciation gifts. I love how it turned out! What do you think?

kitchen towel, flowers, reese's, orange flavored water, an orange shaped popscicle, fan, tumbler, and citrus juicer

Can't wait to see what Second Grade will bring!

Teacher Appreciation Subway Art

My biggest little guy is wrapping up his first year of Kindergarten tomorrow. Seems like not too long ago I was writing about his first day - boy does time fly!

Nathan was blessed this year with an amazing teacher who poured a lot into him and helped him walk through this first year of school as the youngest child in his class. She has had nothing but positive things to say about him and has helped him grow and stretch in new, wonderful ways. I wracked my brain to come up with a gift worthy of all her hard work and decided on something that I hope speaks to the beauty of her teaching.

I started by printing off this subway art I found over at Today's Fabulous Finds, after inserting his teacher's name first by using Word. I put it in one of the zillions of frames we had laying around and had a great base for my picture. In fact, you could really stop at this step if you wanted.

I wanted to jazz it up a bit though so I dug through my craft disaster area supplies and found these chipboard letters that I had picked up on clearance at Michaels awhile back.

I found one of each letter and glued them around the outside of the frame to make an alphabet border.

Finally, I created some small Ric Rac Roses courtesy of this tutorial from The Ribbon Retreat Blog and attached them to two of the corners using hot glue.

All done! A beautiful wall hanging for a more-than-deserving teacher.